Searching Europeana Collections

Searching on Europeana Collections is as easy as entering keywords or phrases. If know what you’re looking for, use these simple search tips to help you.

· who: followed by a name of a person will display items for which that person is listed as the creator. For example, who: Vincent van Gogh gives results of van Gogh's works, but not photographs of him or documentaries about him and his work.

· what: followed by a type of item, a subject or words from the title of the item will display only items of the requested type or subject or items whose title includes your search term. For example, what: maps will narrow your results to maps, or what: Art Nouveau will display Art Nouveau artworks, buildings and monuments

· where: followed by a placename will display items which were created in, published in or depict that place. For example, searching for where: Milan will help find objects created or held in Milan, but not items on writer Milan Kundera

· when: followed by a date will display items for which the date is listed in the item's date field. For example, when: 1984 will show items dated 1984, excluding items that have 1984 in their title or description, such as George Orwell's novel. You can also search using YEAR: For example, YEAR:1910 or YEAR:[1525 TO 1527]

These search functions also support different spellings and languages. For example, when you search for where: Milan, the results will also include items with Milano, Mailand or Milanas listed as their geographic coverage.

Searching Europeana Collections: Expert search tips

In addition to these specific search, you can also use the following to help your searches.

To search for a phrase, use quotation marks (e.g. “art nouveau”) around the phrase or type AND between the words (e.g. art AND nouveau).

Use AND, OR, NOT to refine your searches, eg salt AND pepper; salt NOT pepper; salt OR pepper

· AND - Finds results that contain all of the specified words - you can also use && or + · OR - Finds results that contain at least one of the specified words - you can also use || · NOT - Excludes results that contain the specified word - you can also use - or !

Use ( ) to group searches, e.g. “(salt AND pepper) AND cooking”

If you are not sure of spelling, you can use wildcards such as * or ? These will work on all words, but not in the first letter of the word.

· Wildcard - * - will find words with any number of letters, for example “ca*” will find cat, cap, cane, cable, canary · Wildcard - ? - single letter wildcard, anywhere except first character, for example “ca?e” will find cane, care, case etc. · You can also use ~ to find results with a similar spelling. For example, searching Text~ will also include words like test, text, texts

Search results

Using the Refine Your Search menus, you can filter the search results you receive by media type, copyright status, country, language, cultural institution or aggregator (the national organisation or project through which Europeana receives content)

Search results are presented in a grid or a list. You can select how many results to show per page by selecting 12, 24, 48 or 96 from drop-down list either above or below the results.